What would a washed up Gnome Mage do after years to plucking Moonkin, burning Trees to the ground, roasting Trolls, dismembering Forsaken, BBQ’ing Tauren and drooling over Blood Elves?

I thought I’d turn away from Fire, from destruction, from turning things into carbon to growing things, lovingly, patiently.

I never thought there could be anything more beautiful than the glare of the Fireball roaring across the horizon to king hit the healer at the back of the pack, but I was prepared to try.

So, starting with a few seeds, a can of water and some appropriately fertile soil, I began my new adventures in gardening.

I can’t go wrong can I?

I’m a Gnome, and there are all the legends of Garden Gnome.

I have green hair… which isn’t quite a green thumb, but being a Mage, it makes sense that the green taint would move from my thumb to my ultimate source of power, my mind (Yes I looked elsewhere, but I’m afraid you girls might be disappointed.. although for the bachelor Gnome, a lack of fertility in other digits may be a Darwinian advantage).

So everything in place, I waited… and waited… and you know how people carry on about watching grass grow… yeah, well, waiting for seeds to germinate is bad for a Gnome with Battleground PTSD. As soon as I saw something out of the corner of my eye FIREBLAST! Oh damn…

After a good 15 minutes, I got bored of waiting for the seeds to sprout and realized that I’m not much of a traditional gardener, I’m a Mage, therefore I should be exploring the groundbreaking new field of Magically Engineered plant crops.

It meant I had to dip into my non-specialty Trees (Ohh how Ironic that they call them Trees), into Arcane and Frost.. not so much for the Frost mind you, more for the water behind it. Very soon I had my pot full of flowers, but something was not quite right.

They were all kind of… lacking in life.

Determined I tried again and again, each time with the same level of success.

That was when the feeling of horror descended upon my spiky, but balding pate. I tried to dispose of my abhorrent creations in the only way I know how… Fire, BURN THEM TO THE GROUND! I said.

But, the fire wasn’t there… so where could I possibly be getting this power from?

OHHHHH NOOOOOOO

I may be a Mage in game, but I’m an Affliction Warlock in real life.

Every living thing I touch dies. Not in a bit fiery flash, but in a slow draining of life… a DOT… DOT… DEAD fashion.

This cannot be true, yet the results speak for themselves.

I have put gardening and flower arranging behind me. I’m back in game doing what I do best, blasting noobs with my Pyroblasts and letting my “little boys” dance all over their faces.

Of Bolting Horses and Open Gates

Not unlike many, I have been enjoying what felt like a hollow victory.

I know there are many that felt this was never an issue.

I know that many feel that others, myself included I am sure, are being ungracious in our dancing in the streets and conditional praise of Blizzard and Mike the Man.

I know I am still unsettled, but after a weekend of calm quiet reflection (that’s Arenas folks), the pieces came together for me.

Conspiracy theories etc aside… well I guess not aside, we are all pretty certain that the partnership with Facebook was not just for fun, that the change in the ToS from we will protect your personal data, to we will share your personal data, that the careful business wording of Mike’s “GOOD NEWS EVERYONE” announcement does nothing to dispel our fears, but rather leaves all the doors open (Like any good Business statement should of course).

Anyway, all that aside, we already have Facebook for WoW, or WoWbook, or FaceWow or whatever it is.

We have RealID, we have a non-server, non-faction based friends list which allows us to see and request friend status, not just with our immediate “I already know your deep dark personal secrets” friends, but their friends as well – all using our Real (your privacy was once protected) Name.

We may have stopped them introducing this to the forums, but we have allowed them to share our personal names already, a base on which many other things will come.

The best we may see of this is that they do allow use to display an alias instead, but that is the best that I can see happening.

It’s all OK if you just treat yourself like a kid!

Of course you could, as many have already done, go down the route of limiting your social interaction (The Social being the important part of this right?) with the world by imposing Parental Controls on yourself.

Parental Controls ARE NOT privacy settings, they are setting designed to reduce the access the player has to aspects of the game, which as a by product, reduce your visibility.

I’m not a kid, I don’t want to be treated like a kid, I don’t want to treat myself like a kid. I just want control over my personal information and who I share it with.

It’s a crying shame really

Over the last week, I have realized that I would like to add a bunch of you to my friends list. I know it would end up being insane, there would be no downtime. Once you stick a pile of bloggers and blog readers in one chat channel, Trade chat seems relatively sedate.

Still, I would love to know what you are doing, I’d love to know how Horde side Aman’Thul are hurting during WG, I’d love to share how I am hurting during WSG, but…

I’m not ready to extend our relationship to the next level. I’m more than happy for you to refer to me as Snowy, or Gnomer or Nutsack, whatever Alias would be available, but if my friends of 20 years don’t get my real name without need, neither do you.

Us & Them

I realise now why some people don’t mind.

I realise now why Blizzard thought there would be no issues with the Forums.

It’s because there are a lot of people for whom sharing this personal information is 2nd nature, they do it and have been doing it for a while.

I’m cool with that, with them happy to share, but I’m don’t want to join that group.

I want to be able to control how much of me you get to see… Hell, even Facebook lets to select privacy settings for different parts of your Facebook world.

It’s not the Next Change you need to fear.

Many of us are suspicious waiting for the next Blizzard announcement, wondering how they will slip RealID into it, gank us like that mongrel of a Rogue in Arenas last night, Dot us up like those stinking Warlocks, so by the time we realise we are in trouble, we are so cursed we can’t take any action anyway.

But the reality is we don’t need to fear the next change, so much as the previous one.

RealID is here.

We didn’t see the full picture then and while many of us had misgivings, it wasn’t easy to articulate them. The Forums gave us a tangible target and we have stopped that, but the question is whether they will roll privacy controls and aliases into all things RealID, or just the forums.

The game is not just changing, it has changed.

The forums was a no-brainer for Blizzard, the infrastructure is already present, we are already friending our best buddies and it wont be long before we are friending our best buddies buddies.

I’m no longer angry, I’m just resigned.

I’m still a key press away from returning to flower arranging, but I just need to weigh up the pros and cons…

Mage in a privacy free WoW, or

Warlock IRL

Which of course reminds me of TBC, when Mages were fodder and Warlocks were kings (or queens). A time when Mages across the world were asking whether Blizzard rolled Warlocks and deleted Mages.

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I’ll tell you my experience with realID so far. I was also keen to limit my exposure so the only people on my real friends list are my husband and sisters.

And now I can NEVER realid friend anyone else, because I want to protect my family’s privacy and not have my sisters subjected to well meaning interjections on realID chat from some random (to them) person I raid with occasionally and they neither know nor care about.

The thing with these social networks is that your privacy is only as safe as the least secure person on your friend list. I don’t think people truly understand that yet, no matter how many spies iRL are inadvertently outed by their wives’s birthday pics or how many people post details of Bobby Koticks’ family (gotten from his wife’s facebook page).

But if you actually don’t care about your friends’ privacy then I guess it’s fine to go ahead and share with the world.

It’s true. We probably woke up way too late. I feel stupid for not understanding what was happening until now. Oh well. Sometimes you don’t see a paradigm shift until afterwards.

I feel like you. Saddened. We got rid of this but we’re not back at where we were one week ago before it started. The ghost is out of the bottle sort of. Refuses to return.

I think we’re very much on the same page here. I know some of my readers don’t like it, calling me childish. I’ve thought it over, looking back to my writings, wondering if I was too harsh and went too far. But I don’t think so. Nevertheless it makes me sad that this sort of splits up the community the way it does.

I’m trying now to stop posting about this issue – I think people are pretty tired of it. But blogging is after all mostly therapeutical, so there will be yet another post incoming in… 30 minutes.

Regardless of what happens, if you – or I – drift away from WoW I hope – or rather know – we’ll remain friends. You know where to find me.

RealID is a very curious thing to me. While the concept is a very good one, the implementation is very sloppy and very rushed and very un-Blizzardlike. This is the company that embodies the phrase “When It’s Done(tm)” as a way of life.

So I’m not quite sure what to make of all of this. I dislike it when people’s knee-jerk reaction is to blame Activision and Bobby Kotick, but I’m wondering if, in this case, they’d be right.

i go back and forth on this whole Real ID thing. at first i thought it was a great thing — clean out the official forums, etc. — and then gnome’s, larisa’s, and every other mage blogger’s posts got me to thinking about the security aspects, and i changed my mind.

i am still on board with it being a bad idea overall.

but my feelings go back and forth, and it’s hard for me to list all the “this side” or “that side” arguments that i’ve gone through. bottom line is that i feel that blizz has heard the players, and whoever was behind this idea has been given a real awakening. once i started seeing this story posted in major news outlets, i knew blizz had to back down, and i’m glad they did. i don’t think they will be so quick to go down this road again anytime soon.

While I’m feeling better about things, I am still highly suspicious… until Blizz give us control over our privacy settings, I wont have any real faith.

Hell, even Facebook allows you to decide whether it’s just friends, or friends of friends… and they allow you a handle.

Things are definitely changing. I will cope with certain options.

Not the option to Opt In and lose rights, but to opt In/Out and maintain rights.

I fear there will be lots of.. Free to Play.. not quite right, but “remove this annoyance” features in future… I don’t want it.. I don’t particularly want to pay for it… doesn’t 5 years of subs count for anything?

Tangential, but thanks for stopping by my place during the kerfluffle. Yours is a blog I heard about but never really read. More the pity me. Now I have you in my reader, and need to peruse some archives. :)

How about we all try something nhew for a few weeks, especially if somebody hears about an alternate? I was thinking that if the raid wiping continues then I was goin to find something else to play for a while.

The new starwars game looks good, and would be a total change of pixels.